There is a subsystem in our brains called “conscience”. We learn what is right and what is wrong in our early years, perhaps with certain priors (“causing harm to others is bad”). These things can also change by time (slowly!) per person, for example if the context of the feelings dramatically changes (oops, there is no God).
So agreeing with Subhan, I think we just do what we “want”, maximizing the good feelings generated by our decisions. We (“we” = the optimization process trying to accomplish that) don’t have access to the lower level (on/off switch of conscience), so in many cases the best solution is to avoid doing “bad” things. (And it really feels different a) to want something because we like it b) to want something to avoid the bad feelings generated by conscience). What our thoughts can’t control directly seems to be an objective, higher level truth, that’s the algorithm feels from the inside.
Furthermore, see psychopaths. They don’t seem to have the same mental machinery of conscience, so the utility of their harmful intentions don’t get the same correction factor. And so immoral they become.
There is a subsystem in our brains called “conscience”. We learn what is right and what is wrong in our early years, perhaps with certain priors (“causing harm to others is bad”). These things can also change by time (slowly!) per person, for example if the context of the feelings dramatically changes (oops, there is no God).
So agreeing with Subhan, I think we just do what we “want”, maximizing the good feelings generated by our decisions. We (“we” = the optimization process trying to accomplish that) don’t have access to the lower level (on/off switch of conscience), so in many cases the best solution is to avoid doing “bad” things. (And it really feels different a) to want something because we like it b) to want something to avoid the bad feelings generated by conscience). What our thoughts can’t control directly seems to be an objective, higher level truth, that’s the algorithm feels from the inside.
Furthermore, see psychopaths. They don’t seem to have the same mental machinery of conscience, so the utility of their harmful intentions don’t get the same correction factor. And so immoral they become.